although they had secretly wished for each
other's society. As the voyage drew to a close, however, Stephen was no
longer able to resist an attraction which he felt like a compelling
magnetism. His excuse was that he wanted to know Miss Ray's first
impressions of the place she had constantly seen in her thoughts during
ten years.

"Is it like what you expected?" he asked.

"Yes," she said, "it's like, because I have photographs. And I've read
every book I could get hold of, old and new, in French as well as
English. I always kept up my French, you know, for the same reason that
I studied Arabic. I think I could tell the names of some of the
buildings, without making mistakes. Yet it looks different, as the
living face of a person is different from a portrait in black and white.
And I never imagined such a sky. I didn't know skies could be of such a
colour. It's as if pale fire were burning behind a thin veil of blue."

It was as she said. Stephen had seen vivid skies on the Riviera, but
there the blue was more opaque, like the blue of the turquoise. Here it
was ethereal and quivering, like the violet fire that hovers over
burning ship-logs. He was glad the sky of Africa was unlike any other
sky he had known. It intensified the thrill of enchantment he had begun
to feel. It seemed to him that it might be possible for a man to forget
things in a country where even the sky was of another blue.

Sometimes, when Stephen had read in books of travel (at which he seldom
even glanced), or in novels, about "the mystery of the East," he had
smiled in a superior way. Why should the East be more mysterious than
the West, or North, or South, except that women were shut up in harems
and wore veils if they stirred out of doors? Such customs could scarcely
make a whole country mysterious. But now, though he had not yet landed,
he knew that he would be compelled to acknowledge the indefinable
mystery at which he had sneered. Already he fancied an elusive
influence, like the touch of a ghost. It was in the pulsing azure of the
sky; in the wild forms of the Atlas and far Kabyle mountains stretching
into vague, pale distances; in the ivory white of the low-domed roofs
that gleamed against the vivid green hill of the Sahel, like pearls on a
veiled woman's breast.

"Is it what you thought it would be?" Victoria inquired in her turn.

"I hadn't thought much about it," Stephen had to confess, fearing she
would consider such indifference